Adapt Learning Community: Best LMS / Incorporating Claro DominKnow Authoring

Hello,

We are new to Adapt and have begun diving right in to attempt to set up our e-learning course creation pipeline.

The Install / Basics / Development (grunt build, server, watch, etc.) all work wonderfully on my local environment and I can create a course with (relative) ease.

As we are looking to push things to a min viable product state and incorporate Adapt into this, we need to:

1) decide on a LMS solution (we currently use LearnDash on Wordpress which doesn't seem suitable)

2) Find a way to incorporate our Authoring tool in a streamlined way that is easier than manually coding the .json (since the Authoring Tool seems to be a while out)

We currently use Claro DominKnow to Author our Courses (which can export as full SCORM-compliant zips, excel, xml, and other)

Is it feasible / possible to use the Handlebars Templating with some sort of script to load an XML (or other) export from Claro into the articles, blocks, components, etc files?

What have others done to author their courses in a less developer-oriented environment? i.e. not have to manually code each component, block, and article?

Thanks,

Mike

Hi Mike,

thanks for your note. I'm glad to hear that the setup instructions worked well for you. If you come across any omissions or issues with any of the documentation, please let us know. We're always keen to improve things (even if it may take us some time).

With regards to choosing an LMS, we (as Adapt Learning) would like to be agnostic and to make sure Adapt content runs well on any given LMS.

However, as a starting point, and seeing as there is some alignment in the approach, you might look for open source option. There are several mature and well-adopted systems out there, including Moodle (or Totara), Docebo etc. a quick Google search brought up this list. It's a little out of date but hopefully still a helpful starting point.

With regards to the authoring tool, we're working on it and making good progress but as you say, it may still take a while before it's ready. I'm sure there are ways and means to create custom approaches to writing transformation scripts etc. This may work well if it's not too much effort. However, if it looks like a large effort, my plea to you would be to support us developing the tool that rather than incurring huge effort and cost creating a custom solution.

That said, I am equally keen to hear what others are doing so looking forward to any suggestions this thread may elicit.

All the best,
Sven

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I too expect people to write transformation tools to produce Adapt-conforming content from content written originally for other formats, either because the content already exists, or because they want to target multiple publishing formats and the Adapt format is not their primary format.

While I applaud the goal of building a user-friendly tool for authoring content, that seems like an ambitious endeavour. Meanwhile, I can see value in a more low tech tool that could validate the JSON-based content. That has three important use cases IMO:

help authors create valid content now (which is really, but really hard as it is so easy to make mistakes)
help people writing transformations to Adapt to ensure their transformations are correct
help with other automated validation scenarios, say, from a continuous build.

Cheers,

Rafael

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It's been quite a while since this post was active, but I am curious if anyone mastered the LMS side of Adapt.

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Hi Craig,

We are using the AT0.1.4 with the Spoor extension and have it working with Moodle2.9, hope this gives you an idea for proceding or not.

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Hi Craig,

Appitierre use Adapt extensively and have been for the past few years. We've experienced a lot of LMS's over the past few years. Most of which haven't quite sorted out the responsive element of displaying Adapt content. Although we can fix this issue with a popup screen, I personally find this a jarring experience which is why it led us to build an LMS for Adapt. Taking on Adapt as a non scorm object had it's challenges but we've not looked back. Adapt's API is extremely powerful and is able to extract analytics we all dream about recording:

- Where is the learner struggling

- Where did they go after answer this question

- What were their answer to all the questions and be able to compare them across users.

- What questions aren't structured correctly

We have sessions that enable you to return to the course and have all your session data stored. We know it turns it's back on the SCORM standard (a standard this industry has relied on for the last 15 years) but once people see what we're able to track it's no longer an issue. Relying on a technology that is over 15 years old where data tracking wasn't considered important seems like we've been held back for too long.

It's why we're now seeing a lot of newer LMS's come out, some completely going away from SCORM and the Tin-Can API. All of this brings new and innovative approaches. Take Code School or Khan Academy - two of the most leading online Learning Platforms. They don't use Tin-Can or SCORM.

I've seen some great implementation with other newer LMS's like Curatr and Intellum's Succeed. Both of which have taken Adapt and added their own spin. It's always amazing to see what people do with Adapt. But what's great about these new implementations is that we're starting to see innovation with responsive learning. With Adapt being one of the leading frameworks for creating responsive learning, it's an exciting space to be apart of!

Thanks,

Daryl

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Daryl,

Thanks for this information. I completely agree about new/flexible approaches to tracking. This was my intuition, but seeing it 'confirmed' by your experience is encouraging.

When I started thinking about tracking for Adapt, and particularly for the scenarios in which I'm interested, I soon thought that tracking should not necessarily be tied neither to 'traditional' LMSs or LRSs (for xAPI), nor to specific data formats.

I recently released a tracking extension (available here) which is fairly general, and it does xAPI (as a 'particular' case). I think SCORM and now xAPI will still be relevant (proably for corporate/formal training settings) ... but there are many cases in which taking advantage of the Adapt API and expressing tracking data in whatever way is most convenient to you, will provide a lot of flexibility (as you seem to have experienced).⋅

Regards.

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Hi,

Indeed - SCORM will be there for corporate training (hopefully not for very long) and it's why we've layered our tracking in our authoring tool so you can pick your output:

- No tracking
- Advanced tracking
- SCORM
- Tin-can
- Or a mixture of a few.

I read over your tracking extension - looks good! Some neat bits of code in there.

At Appitierre we've partnered with some companies who have wanted to track what our Platform Bloom tracks and we've been asked to write an Adapt specification for tracking which enables any LMS (old or new) to render advanced tracking analytics inside the LMS without much integration. It should be an interesting project and will push the boundaries of what's already been done with Adapt. Imagine being able to track all the users interactions, points gained, badges earned in a single coherent format...

I'll post more about this once we've finished the project.

Thanks,

Daryl

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